Emotional Awareness: Understanding Disappointment

I only have a few specific memories of kindergarten, but I’m pretty sure I know why this particular one stuck around.

One day, my friend Amy and I were playing inside a gray stand-alone tube on the playground. It was just a tube, and I have no recollection of what was so fun about it, but it was big enough for two little kindergarteners to hide inside and that’s exactly what we chose to do. When the recess whistle blew, we didn’t hear it, and our class left without us. In fact, all of the classes left the playground by the time we got bored with playing in that tube.

The crispest part of this memory is what our teacher said when we finally went back to our classroom:

“Well now, Amy, I would expect this of you, but Angela, I’m very disappointed in you.”

And then, I wasn’t allowed to join the class in making dinosaurs out of Fruit Loops.

The reason this quirky little kindergarten memory of mine has stuck around all these years later is because of one word—disappointment.

I was beyond upset that I had disappointed my teacher. Alright, maybe secretly I wanted to make that Fruit Loops dinosaur, but having been the source of disappointment was just more than my little people-pleaser 5-year-old self could take.

Now, as a grown up, I find that being the one left disappointed is no picnic either. I’m sure you can relate, and whether your sources of disappointment are small setbacks or huge life altering events, feeling disappointed is never fun.

Earlier this month, I surprised myself with how disappointed I felt over something that, on the surface, was so trivial. I had spontaneously texted my husband to ask if he wanted to go on a date night to Best Buy. Now, let’s just say I’m almost certain that this is the first time I was the one who pitched the idea of going to a tech store, so naturally it was an easy date for him to say yes to.

Only, about a half hour after I asked and he agreed, he had to cancel.

We were both still at work, but as it turned out, his work day was going to get a lot longer. He was needed to drive to a location that would involve four hours of round-trip travel time. No date night that night. No seeing each other until after Best Buy closed and it was almost bedtime.

I realize this is one of those very small setbacks. On the surface it seemed like a ridiculous thing to be disappointed about. However, as I worked through my emotional experience of being disappointed over a canceled spontaneous date, I went deeper. I discovered I wasn’t only thinking of this one missed date night, but I was thinking of bigger pieces of our lifestyle.

Even though I’m proud to be a military spouses, there are times I find myself feeling disappointed in the fact that we’re limited in what we have control over. After five years, I’m wondering how I could possibly be surprised by any of the surprises the military brings with it. Five years seems like a good amount of time to have learned to know better. After all, it only took one experience for me to learn that I shouldn’t hang around the playground after all of the classes leave.

I decided I would try to learn from this specific disappointment experience. Turning to research, I found an academic journal called Cognition and Emotion, with an article that turned out to be helpful and interesting. As I read through the article, I learned there were some central components of an emotional experience.

The following five components actually:

Feelings: What you’re feeling during the time you’re experiencing an emotion.

Thoughts: Your thinking during the time you’re experiencing an emotion.

Action Tendencies: The actions you feel like doing during the time you’re experiencing an emotion.

Actions: What you actually choose to do during the time you’re experiencing an emotion.

Emotivational Goals: What you want to gain from the time you are experiencing an emotion. I do promise the article used the word emotivational and I didn’t just make it up! (Zeelenberg, van Dijk, Manstead, & van der Pligt, 2000, p. 524)

As I said, I was trying to learn from this experience of disappointment. I read the article, and from learning those five components of an emotional experience, I had a concrete way to frame my disappointment. I spent time working through each component and writing down my recollection of each piece. This writing gave me a lot of clarity and awareness, which I think shows me that knowing these five components is a useful tool.

Emotional awareness is a huge part of mental health and regardless of which emotions surface, how we deal with emotions and react to them is critical. I plan to remember how much more understanding I gained by writing my way through those five components. The next time I have an emotional experience—positive or negative—I now have this handy tool to help me process my emotion and move on from there.

Besides finding out about the five parts of an emotional experience, the article also provided something even more valuable—three ways to avoid disappointment!

Here’s what you can do:

1. Weigh the Risks

In any situation, you can opt for safer alternatives to try and reduce the risk of disappointment. If you’re able to use a bit of forward thinking, you can decide which expectations are worth it for you to hold on to.

For example, once I asked my husband if he wanted to go on a date night and he agreed, I expected it to happen. I created that expectation in an instant. However, if I had just been a little more cautionary in my approach, I might have led myself to a better bet of my expectation being met. All I really had to do, and what I will probably try to remember for next time, is to ask my husband about date night after he comes home from work.

2. Initial Expectations

If you go back to your original motivation or goal that you wanted to attain, you might put in more effort into getting the outcome that you’re hoping for.

Originally, what I was really excited about was a new tech tool and going out to purchase it. Yes, I tied this expectation to being with my husband and turning the experience into a fun date. However, if I really wanted that tech tool on that evening, I could have gone out to Best Buy alone. I might still have found my item with a salesperson’s help. I could have, but that just wasn’t what I wanted anymore.

I preferred the date. So I waited. I got the date the next night and the tech tool too! To top it all off, it was a super fun date night. I’m not even sure it would have wound up being as fun if we went the original day I had asked. Guess, what? It doesn’t even matter. The point is, I saw my original expectations change and turn into the outcome I really wanted.

3. Reevaluate your Expectations

So as it turns out, there is this connection between expectations and disappointment. If you lower your expectations, then there is a better chance that reality will meet or exceed what you expected which, of course, would lead to greater satisfaction for you. Further, if lowering your expectations isn’t the easiest task, or proving helpful, then you might try to trick yourself into thinking your expected outcome isn’t that great anyway. This is not to say you should completely avoid all of your high expectations. However, you can modify them just a bit in order to appease your emotional state.

In my case, I can’t imagine not wanting to not go on dates with my husband, but I can try to let go of the idea any advance notice. If I ever need a reminder about planned expectations, I can just think back to how much better our date turned out to be on the second shot we had at it. Separately, I could have tried to convince myself the tech tool I wanted wasn’t so great or necessary. I’m really glad that instead, I convinced myself that it wasn’t necessary to have it the exact original day I wanted it. I really love it, and think it’s the best thirty bucks of technology I ever purchased. I even used it to draft this post! But, I also waited for it until my husband could take me on a fun date to get it.

(See my new tech tool below—a Bluetooth keyboard!)

The learning and self-discovery I gained through my emotional experience is my hope for minimizing my disappointment experiences in the future. What have been some of your expectations gone by the wayside in this military life? Do you have a favorite way to work through or snap out of disappointments, big or small?

Looking for the article I mentioned?

Did you know as a military spouse you can access the MWR Digital Library though Military One Source? You can create a log-in and search many different types of library resources! If you feel inclined to check out the article that I found, it is available as part of the Academic Search Premier part of the MWR Digital Library.

References:

Zeelenberg, M., van Dijk, W., Manstead, A., & van der Pligt, J. (2000). On bad decisions and disconfirmed expectancies: The psychology of regret and disappointment. Cognition and Emotion, 14, 521-541.